Dickens at Christmas (Vintage Classics)

by Charles Dickens

  ‘O Marion! O Marion!’

  ‘I had tried to seem indifferent to him’; and she pressed her sister’s face against her own; ‘but that was hard, and you were always his true advocate. I had tried to tell you of my resolution, but you would never hear me; you would never understand me. The time was drawing near for his return. I felt that I must act, before the daily intercourse between us was renewed. I knew that one great pang, undergone at that time, would save a lengthened agony to all of us. I knew that if I went away then, that end must follow which has followed, and which has made us both so happy, Grace! I wrote to good Aunt Martha, for a refuge in her house: I did not then tell her all, but something of my story, and she freely promised it. While I was contesting that step with myself, and with my love of you, and home, Mr Warden, brought here by an accident, became, for some time, our companion.’

  ‘I have sometimes feared of late years, that this might have been,’ exclaimed her sister; and her countenance was ashy-pale. ‘You never loved him – and you married him in your self-sacrifice to me!’

  ‘He was then,’ said Marion, drawing her sister closer to her, ‘on the eve of going secretly away for a long time. He wrote to me, after leaving here; told me what his condition and prospects really were; and offered me his hand. He told me he had seen I was not happy in the prospect of Alfred’s return. I believe he thought my heart had no part in that contract; perhaps thought I might have loved him once, and did not then; perhaps thought that when I tried to seem indifferent, I tried to hide indifference – I cannot tell. But I wished that you should feel me wholly lost to Alfred – hopeless to him – dead. Do you understand me, love?’

  Her sister looked into her face, attentively. She seemed in doubt.

  ‘I saw Mr Warden, and confided in his honour; charged him with my secret, on the eve of his and my departure. He kept it. Do you understand me, dear?’

  Grace looked confusedly upon her. She scarcely seemed to hear.

  ‘My love, my sister!’ said Marion, ‘recall your thoughts a moment; listen to me. Do not look so strangely on me. There are countries, dearest, where those who would abjure a misplaced passion, or would strive, against some cherished feeling of their hearts and conquer it, retire into a hopeless solitude, and close the world against themselves and worldly loves and hopes for ever. When women do so, they assume that name which is so dear to you and me, and call each other Sisters. But, there may be sisters, Grace, who, in the broad world out of doors, and underneath its free sky, and in its crowded places, and among its busy life, and trying to assist and cheer it and to do some good – learn the same lesson; and who, with hearts still fresh and young, and open to all happiness and means of happiness, can say the battle is long past, the victory long won. And such a one am I! You understand me now?’

  Still she looked fixedly upon her, and made no reply.

  ‘Oh Grace, dear Grace,’ said Marion, clinging yet more tenderly and fondly to that breast from which she had been so long exiled, ‘if you were not a happy wife and mother – if I had no little namesake here – if Alfred, my kind brother, were not your own fond husband – from whence could I derive the ecstasy I feel tonight! But, as I left here, so I have returned. My heart has known no other love, my hand has never been bestowed apart from it. I am still your maiden sister, unmarried, unbetrothed: your own loving old Marion, in whose affection you exist alone and have no partner, Grace!’

  She understood her now. Her face relaxed: sobs came to her relief; and falling on her neck, she wept and wept, and fondled her as if she were a child again.

  When they were more composed, they found that the Doctor, and his sister good Aunt Martha, were standing near at hand, with Alfred.

  ‘This is a weary day for me,’ said good Aunt Martha, smiling through her tears, as she embraced her nieces; ‘for I lose my dear companion in making you all happy; and what can you give me, in return for my Marion?’

  ‘A converted brother,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘That’s something, to be sure,’ retorted Aunt Martha, ‘in such a farce as –’

  ‘No, pray don’t,’ said the doctor penitently.

  ‘Well, I won’t,’ replied Aunt Martha. ‘But, I consider myself ill used. I don’t know what’s to become of me without my Marion, after we have lived together half-a-dozen years.’

  ‘You must come and live here, I suppose,’ replied the Doctor. ‘We shan’t quarrel now, Martha.’

  ‘Or you must get married, Aunt,’ said Alfred.

  ‘Indeed,’ returned the old lady, ‘I think it might be a good speculation if I were to set my cap at Michael Warden, who, I hear, is come home much the better for his absence in all respects. But as I knew him when he was a boy, and I was not a very young woman then, perhaps he mightn’t respond. So I’ll make up my mind to go and live with Marion, when she marries, and until then (it will not be very long, I dare say) to live alone. What do you say, Brother?’

  ‘I’ve a great mind to say it’s a ridiculous world altogether, and there’s nothing serious in it,’ observed the poor old Doctor.

  ‘You might take twenty affidavits of it if you chose, Anthony,’ said his sister; ‘but nobody would believe you with such eyes as those.’

  ‘It’s a world full of hearts,’ said the Doctor, hugging his youngest daughter, and bending across her to hug Grace – for he couldn’t separate the sisters; ‘and a serious world, with all its – even with mine, which was enough to have swamped the whole globe; and it is a world on which the sun never rises, but it looks upon a thousand bloodless battles that are some set-off against the miseries and wickedness of Battle-Fields; and it is a world we need be careful how we libel, Heaven forgive us, for it is a world of sacred mysteries, and its Creator only knows what lies beneath the surface of His lightest image!’

  You would not be the better pleased with my rude pen, if it dissected and laid open to your view the transports of this family, long severed and now reunited. Therefore, I will not follow the poor Doctor through his humbled recollection of the sorrow he had had, when Marion was lost to him; nor, will I tell how serious he had found that world to be, in which some love, deep-anchored, is the portion of all human creatures; nor, how such a trifle as the absence of one little unit in the great absurd account, had stricken him to the ground. Nor, how, in compassion for his distress, his sister had, long ago, revealed the truth to him by slow degrees, and brought him to the knowledge of the heart of his self-banished daughter, and to that daughter’s side.

  Nor, how Alfred Heathfield had been told the truth, too, in the course of that then current year; and Marion had seen him, and had promised him, as her brother, that on her birthday, in the evening, Grace should know it from her lips at last.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Doctor,’ said Mr Snitchey, looking into the orchard, ‘but have I liberty to come in?’

  Without waiting for permission, he came straight to Marion, and kissed her hand, quite joyfully.

  ‘If Mr Craggs had been alive, my dear Miss Marion,’ said Mr Snitchey, ‘he would have had great interest in this occasion. It might have suggested to him, Mr Alfred, that our life is not too easy perhaps: that, taken altogether, it will bear any little smoothing we can give it; but Mr Craggs was a man who could endure to be convinced, sir. He was always open to conviction. If he were open to conviction, now, I – this is weakness. Mrs Snitchey, my dear’ – at his summons that lady appeared from behind the door, ‘you are among old friends.’

  Mrs Snitchey having delivered her congratulations, took her husband aside.

  ‘One moment, Mr Snitchey,’ said that lady. ‘It is not in my nature to rake up the ashes of the departed.’

  ‘No, my dear,’ returned her husband.

  ‘Mr Craggs is –’

  ‘Yes, my dear, he is deceased,’ said Snitchey.

  ‘But I ask you if you recollect,’ pursued his wife, ‘that evening of the ball? I only ask you that. If you do; and if your memory has not entirely failed you, Mr Snitchey; and
if you are not absolutely in your dotage; I ask you to connect this time with that – to remember how I begged and prayed you, on my knees –’

  ‘Upon your knees, my dear?’ said Mr Snitchey.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Snitchey, confidently, ‘and you know it – to beware of that man – to observe his eye – and now to tell me whether I was right, and whether at that moment he knew secrets which he didn’t choose to tell.’

  ‘Mrs Snitchey,’ returned her husband, in her ear, ‘Madam. Did you ever observe anything in my eye?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Snitchey, sharply. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

  ‘Because, Madam, that night,’ he continued, twitching her by the sleeve, ‘it happens that we both knew secrets which we didn’t choose to tell, and both knew just the same professionally. And so the less you say about such things the better, Mrs Snitchey; and take this as a warning to have wiser and more charitable eyes another time. Miss Marion, I brought a friend of yours along with me. Here! Mistress!’

  Poor Clemency, with her apron to her eyes, came slowly in, escorted by her husband; the latter doleful with the presentiment, that if she abandoned herself to grief, the Nutmeg-Grater was done for.

  ‘Now, Mistress,’ said the lawyer, checking Marion as she ran towards her, and interposing himself between them, ‘what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘The matter!’ cried poor Clemency – when, looking up in wonder, and in indignant remonstrance, and in the added emotion of a great roar from Mr Britain, and seeing that sweet face so well remembered close before her, she stared, sobbed, laughed, cried, screamed, embraced her, held her fast, released her, fell on Mr Snitchey and embraced him (much to Mrs Snitchey’s indignation), fell on the Doctor and embraced him, fell on Mr Britain and embraced him, and concluded by embracing herself, throwing her apron over her head, and going into hysterics behind it.

  A stranger had come into the orchard, after Mr Snitchey, and had remained apart, near the gate, without being observed by any of the group; for they had little spare attention to bestow, and that had been monopolised by the ecstasies of Clemency. He did not appear to wish to be observed, but stood alone, with downcast eyes; and there was an air of dejection about him (though he was a gentleman of a gallant appearance) which the general happiness rendered more remarkable.

  None but the quick eyes of Aunt Martha, however, remarked him at all; but, almost as soon as she espied him, she was in conversation with him. Presently, going to where Marion stood with Grace and her little namesake, she whispered something in Marion’s ear, at which she started, and appeared surprised; but soon recovering from her confusion, she timidly approached the stranger, in Aunt Martha’s company, and engaged in conversation with him too.

  ‘Mr Britain,’ said the lawyer, putting his hand in his pocket, and bringing out a legal-looking document, while this was going on, ‘I congratulate you. You are now the whole and sole proprietor of that freehold tenement, at present occupied and held by yourself as a licensed tavern, or house of public entertainment, and commonly called or known by the sign of the Nutmeg-Grater. Your wife lost one house, through my client Mr Michael Warden; and now gains another. I shall have the pleasure of canvassing you for the county, one of these fine mornings.’

  ‘Would it make any difference in the vote if the sign was altered, sir?’ asked Britain.

  ‘Not in the least,’ replied the lawyer.

  ‘Then,’ said Mr Britain, handing him back the conveyance, ‘just clap in the words, “and Thimble,” will you be so good; and I’ll have the two mottoes painted up in the parlour instead of my wife’s portrait.’

  ‘And let me,’ said a voice behind them; it was the stranger’s – Michael Warden’s; ‘let me claim the benefit of those inscriptions. Mr Heathfield and Dr Jeddler, I might have deeply wronged you both. That I did not, is no virtue of my own. I will not say that I am six years wiser than I was, or better. But I have known, at any rate, that term of self-reproach. I can urge no reason why you should deal gently with me. I abused the hospitality of this house; and learnt by my own demerits, with a shame I never have forgotten, yet with some profit too, I would fain hope, from one,’ he glanced at Marion, ‘to whom I made my humble supplication for forgiveness, when I knew her merit and my deep unworthiness. In a few days I shall quit this place for ever. I entreat your pardon. Do as you would be done by! Forget and Forgive!’

  Time – from whom I had the latter portion of this story, and with whom I have the pleasure of a personal acquaintance of some five-and-thirty years’ duration – informed me, leaning easily upon his scythe, that Michael Warden never went away again, and never sold his house, but opened it afresh, maintained a golden means of hospitality, and had a wife, the pride and honour of that countryside, whose name was Marion. But, as I have observed that Time confuses facts occasionally, I hardly know what weight to give to his authority.

  THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST’S BARGAIN

  1 THE GIFT BESTOWED

  EVERYBODY SAID SO.

  Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken in most instances such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; ‘but that’s no rule,’ as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad.

  The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.

  Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. He did.

  Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face, – as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity, – but might have said he looked like a haunted man?

  Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a byegone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?

  Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a haunted man?

  Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory, – for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily, – who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour; – who that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too?

  Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on haunted ground?

  His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like – an old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects, smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stacks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to
droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when in all other places it was silent and still.

  His dwelling, at its heart and core – within doors – at his fireside – was so lowering and old, so crazy, yet so strong, with its worm-eaten beams of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelving downward to the great oak chimney-piece; so environed and hemmed in by the pressure of the town, yet so remote in fashion, age and custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door was shut, – echoes, not confined to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where the Norman arches were half-buried in the earth.